Online Networks and the 7-Year Friend Itch
October 9, 2009 :: Joe LoongSometimes, I’ll review the list of my friends and followers on a social networking platform and find myself staring at a name and and asking, “Who are you?”
This isn’t in an existential, “Can one ever truly know someone?” kind of way — I’m literally thinking, “Who the heck are you and I how do I know you?”
Oftentimes, it’s because I only know them by a nickname or online handle, whereas the network uses their real name (as in the case of Facebook). Or they’ve changed a name along the way. Or it’s simply an old connection that I’ve just drifted away from.
Most of the time, though, it’s because a person’s presence in my social network simply reflects a momentary connection — say, an introduction at an event or party — but they’re lumped in (probably alphabetically) and given the same weight as people with whom I have much stronger, even lifelong, connections. Unless I was diligent and added tags, notes, or categorized them in the proper group — anything to put them in an identifiable context — it’s up to me to remember the distinctions.
Of course, this isn’t a new phenomena — we ran into the same problem flipping through paper address books, Christmas card lists, Rolodexes, or Filofaxes. Online, it’s simply more accessible, both to ourselves and to others.
The 7-Year Friend Itch
This past summer, an academic paper came out and quantified this occurrence, saying that our friend networks (that’s in the broader, traditional sense, not just online) turn over every 7 years.
At least, that how it was popularly reported. I don’t know that anyone has actually read the paper, since the full text doesn’t appear to be online. Also, the 7-year figure just reflects the fact that the study period ran from 2000-2007, which also means that we don’t really know the full scope of how social networking tools affects that behavior, especially if those online interactions are an integral part of the network from the get-go.
Generally speaking, though, the 7-year figure feels right. In your youth, your social network centers around school, which has some built-in stopping points, forcing turnover. Once you get out of school, most of your friend network probably revolves around your workplace, and as we get older, in addition to personalities, tastes, and interests changing, there’s a fairly fixed set of life-altering milestones that directly affect our friend networks: people move, switch jobs, date, break up, get married, have kids, get divorced, and die.
In the online context, we can also have to add in the behavior of people flocking to, and then abandoning particular social networking platforms. Even with robust import / export tools, switching networks is an opportunity, to lose or explicitly dump connections.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how online engagements affect overall friend turnover. Which will be the more powerful affect: The constant influx of new people (if it occurs at all — for example, my Facebook friend growth has slowed to a trickle at this point) displacing old people, or the online components reminding us of and reinforcing existing connections.
To the extent that they don’t already exist, maybe social networks should add in tools that shows us the people we haven’t touched online in a while, maybe moving them to an “inactive” category, either to act as a prompt to get back in touch, or to clear them out so we can focus our attention on the friends du jour.
How does the 7-year friend turnover number work for you? Do you think online connections will increase or decrease that figure? Leave a comment (especially if you haven’t touched me online in a while).
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